Steven Savile - Silver

“Already on it, Frosty. Looking for live stream CCTV in the vicinity right now. If she came out that way, I’ll find her, have no fear.”

Ronan walked back toward the apartment on Acorn Road. As he had expected, the police had begun to gather outside the broken window of the hairdressing salon. He had to get back inside Fisher’s place, but he could hardly walk up to the front door looking the way he did; and the back alley was already crawling with cops.

A row of magpies sat on the guttering above the hairdresser’s. He counted them, doing the old rhyme in his head: One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver.

He walked on two streets and stripped out of his leathers and stuffed them behind one of the dumpsters. He would collect them later. One of the bystanders was sure to remember the leather-clad biker who had come chasing the woman out of the broken window. They wouldn’t remember the gray-haired guy in the designer suit.

He took a handkerchief from his pocket, wadded it up and dabbed at his face, using it to soak up the worst of the blood, then dumped it in a trash can. He couldn’t exactly clean himself up properly, but he looked different enough to pass a cursory inspection.

It was all about the instantly recognizable details-that was the way the brain worked. It registered the leathers and more than likely demonized the man holding the gun. Witnesses were unreliable at the best of times. Out of the leathers and tidied up, none of them would identify him as the demon.

“Well,” he said to himself, “time to put the theory to the test.”

He walked back to the alley behind Fisher’s place.

There were two policemen standing guard at the hair-dressers gate.

He said hi as he walked past them. That was part of the trick, having the brass balls to look like you belonged there, no matter where there was. He had to keep his back turned away from them. The last thing he needed was one of them noticing the blood stains. The older of the two police lifted his radio and talked into it. He seemed to be taking a little too much interest in Ronan. He didn’t want him looking too closely.

Ronan kept his pace regular, resisting the temptation to walk faster. He willed the policeman to look away, but he didn’t. Just look like you belong, he said to himself. Keep it natural. You live here. They have no reason to think otherwise. Just walk up to the gate and open it. He was glad he’d taken the extra few seconds to open the green gate before. Now as he reached it, he thumbed down the latch, pushed it open and walked inside. It was a lot less suspicious than boosting himself up over the glass-topped wall.

Inside it took him less than two minutes to find what he’d been looking for.

Beside the computer in the study there was a photo of Fisher and his two girls, and tucked into the frame was one of those little photo-booth instant snaps. The woman in the smaller picture was unmistakably Catherine Meadows. She was cheek-to-cheek and laughing with Sebastian Fisher, and it was obvious in that one photograph that they were in love.

What could make a man burn himself ive? he asked himself, and this time he knew the answer, the only answer: to protect someone he loved.

Sebastian Fisher had loved three people. One of them had burned alive with him-a different place, but the precise same moment in time. The other two were missing.

He called in to Lethe again. “Found the leverage. Some-one took Fisher’s kids.” Judging by the picture and the toys in the room, he made an educated guess at their respective ages, six and eight.

“Bollocks,” Jude Lethe said.

“He was involved with Catherine Meadows, so it isn’t out of the question that Fisher’s kids were used to keep her in line as well. There are enough signs about the place to suggest the pair all but lived together. We aren’t talking an underwear drawer-she’s got half the closet space, half the drawers, and a bathroom cabinet full of cosmetics.”

“Have I told you how much I hate people?” Lethe said. “What are the chances of us getting the kids back alive?”

It wasn’t something Ronan wanted to think about. The truth of the matter was, the kids were almost certainly dead now that they’d outlived their usefulness. “Not going to happen,” Ronan said, rifling the desk drawers as he spoke. “Any joy with the surveillance cameras?”

“Your Jane Bond didn’t come out of the tunnels through any service exit within five hundred yards of where you lost her. Sorry, man. Odds are she doubled back after you were gone and hopped on the next train out of there.” It made sense. She had been thinking at least three moves ahead of him, and that rattled Ronan Frost.

Ronan opened the bottom drawer. Inside was a photograph album that looked as though it had seen better days. He pulled it out and opened it up. It was full of younger versions of Sebastian Fisher and Catherine Meadows mugging for the camera. He thumbed through the pages, looking at the ghosts of two happy people. On the back of the sixth side he found what he was looking for. The top of the page was marked up Masada. The entire gatefold was filled with similar images: the harsh sun, the sand and parched grass and the ruins of the hill fort. He peeled away the film and pocketed each of the photographs. The last one was a group shot of the archeology team. On the back, in neat feminine script, someone had listed the names of the people in the photo. There were thirty in the shot. He recognized almost half of them without having to look up their names.

Four of the Israeli helpers were listed by first name only.

The fifth, shirt sleeves rolled up, eyes like burned-out coals, was labeled as Akim Caspi. Even though he had only seen the one photo of the man in full military regalia, and factoring in the passage of time and unreliable memory, there was no way on God’s earth that the Akim Caspi in the picture was the same Akim Caspi that had been a lieutenant general in the Israeli Defense Force.

Things, as Orla Nyren liked to say, were beginning to get interesting.

They fought as they walked down the street. It was stupid stuff. Sarah wanted to go to Checkpoint Charlie, and he wanted a piping hot Americano and a sickly sweet pastry first. The two didn’t need to be mutually exclusive. He’d tried to reason with her. They were on vacation, and by definition that meant there was no need to rush, but Sarah was being Sarah. She had got it into her head she wanted to get to Friedrichstrasse early so they didn’t waste the rest of the day.

She wanted to hit the Brandenburg Gate, the cathedrals in the Gendarmenmarkt, and if they could manage it, make Spandau around lunchtime. He wanted to take his time, cross over into what had been East Berlin and try to imagine what it had been like back in ’61 when the Russian tanks blocked the road. It was a crying shame they’d torn down the old Watchtower. There was nothing left of the original Checkpoint Charlie buildings, but that didn’t stop him from wanting to soak up the history of the place.

It had become something of a pilgrimage for him-and not the usual honeymoon fare. His grandfather had died trying to come across that no-man’s land between East and West. He knew it was just going to be a street now, but that didn’t matter. It wasn’t what it was, it was what it had been. Sarah understood that. That was one of the reasons he loved her. There were plenty of those. They might fight like cats and dogs but she understood him. Hell, she loved him for his flaws, not despite them, and that was worth every stupid fight they’d ever had.

She’d marked the route on the map, they needed to take the U2 east from Potsdamer Platz to Stadtmitte and transfer on to U6 north.